Iraq presents arms declaration to world

December 8 2002
The Sun-Herald

The Iraqi government has presented to the rest of the world a mass of documents detailing its nuclear, chemical and biological activities and formally declaring to the United Nations that it has no weapons of mass destruction.

The Iraqi government has presented to the rest of the world a mass of documents detailing its nuclear, chemical and biological activities and formally declaring to the United Nations that it has no weapons of mass destruction.

Iraqi officials displayed the giant declaration, totalling more than 12,000 pages, to the international media in the mid-afternoon. It was expected to be handed over to UN officials in Baghdad by late yesterday and flown out on a UN plane to reach UN headquarters in New York and the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna by late today. The UN Security Council had set today as the deadline.

On a table in a government office, reporters were shown bound copies of volumes devoted separately to nuclear, chemical, biological and missile activities titled in English, "Currently Accurate, Full and Complete Declarations". The mass of paper, in volumes spread across the table, was accompanied by computer disks, presumably with additional information.

A dozen Iraqi officials who worked on the declaration stood by, but refused to comment.

Later today, according to an Iraqi state television announcement, a message to the Kuwaiti people from Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was to be broadcast. No other details were immediately available.");document.write("

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The thousands of pages of technical detail will shift the Iraq crisis into a new stage, as Washington and Baghdad move step by step toward a crossroads between war and peace.

Under the same Security Council resolution calling for the report, teams from the New York-based UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, known as UNMOVIC, and the UN nuclear watchdog resumed inspections on November 27 after a four-year interruption.

After a two-day break for a Muslim holiday, they resumed their inspections this morning, visiting uranium storage sites and an Iraqi factory that once made munitions for chemical or biological weapons.

At the munitions factory, the UN team was presumably checking to ensure banned activities have not resumed in the last four years.

The inspectors at what Iraqi Information Ministry officials said were "uranium storage sites" near the major Iraqi nuclear research centre at al-Tuwaitha, south-east of Baghdad, may have been interested in large amounts of low-grade uranium that have been sealed and monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency since the 1990s. Although not bomb-grade material, such fuel could be enriched to that level if major technological hurdles were overcome.

As usual, the UN inspection agency issued no immediate information about the visits.

Iraq's report on past weapons programs and industrial activity will take UN experts weeks to analyse and UN inspectors months to verify inside Iraq. And UN officials said weeding out data that might help others produce chemical, biological or nuclear weapons would further delay handover of material to the Security Council's 15 member nations.

Chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix told reporters in New York yesterday: "No member will get it on Monday."

For all the expectation, the document will be an anticlimax, since it's known that Baghdad will declare it has no chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

"We have absolutely no weapons of mass destruction," Lieutenant General Hossam Mohammed Amin, the Iraqi official who oversaw production of the declaration, told reporters.

Bush administration officials say they're sure Iraq still harbours such arms. If it doesn't disarm, they say, they will seek Security Council sanction for military action against Iraq. Failing that, they say, Washington would initiate such an attack on its own.

US officials have not presented conclusive evidence that Iraq has banned weapons. A White House spokesman said on Thursday, however, that "solid evidence" would be turned over to UN inspectors, without elaborating.

"We would like to have as much information from any member state as evidence that (Iraq) may have weapons of mass destruction," Blix said.

The United States yesterday offered to protect Iraqi scientists who cooperate with international weapons inspectors searching for hidden arms.

The Security Council resolution under which weapons inspectors are working allows them to solicit information from Iraqi scientists without Iraqi officials being present.

The Security Council resolution adopted on November 8 required Iraq to file by tomorrow an "accurate, full, and complete declaration" of all weapons programs. Iraq was also required to report on "all other chemical, biological, and nuclear programs", even if not weapon-related.

"It will be really a huge declaration," said Amin, chief Iraqi liaison to Blix's UN inspectors. He said the material, possibly including computer disks, covered the 1991-98 history of UN weapons and equipment destruction, as well as "new elements".

In the 1990s, after Iraq's defeat in the Persian Gulf War, UN inspectors destroyed many tonnes of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and dismantled its program to try to build nuclear bombs. But the monitoring regime collapsed amid UN-Iraqi disputes, and the inspectors suspect they may have missed some chemical and biological weapons.

The weapons inspectors hope the Iraqis at least will help them answer open questions by, for example, supplying convincing documentation on the fate of 550 artillery shells filled with poisonous mustard gas. Iraqi and UN accounts contain many such discrepancies from the 1990s.

The UN resolution provides that "false statements or omissions" in Iraq's declaration would constitute a "material breach", that is, a potential cause for military action, but only if coupled with Iraqi non-cooperation. That would seem to exempt inaccuracies shown to be inadvertent.

If Iraq is eventually found to have cooperated fully with the inspectors, UN resolutions call for the Security Council to consider lifting economic sanctions imposed on Iraq after it invaded Kuwait in 1990.